The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)

Catherine Marshall is Professor of British Studies at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise in France. Her research focuses mainly on the history of ideas in the second-half of the nineteenth century. She also works on the development of political ideas in Victorian Britain and on their legacy in the twentieth century. She is the co-editor, with Bernard Lightman and Richard England, of a 3-volume critical edition of The papers of The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880) (2015). Bernard Lightman is Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities Department at York University, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and President (2018-2019) of the History of Science Society. Lightman's research focuses on the cultural history of Victorian science. Among his most recent publications are the edited collections Global Spencerism, A Companion to the History of Science, and Science Museums in Transition (co-edited with Carin Berkowitz). He is one of the general editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall. Richard England is a historian of science and religion and Honors College administrator who has published on the history of evolutionary thought and controversy, with a particular interest in Victorian religious responses to Darwinism. In teaching Honors classes at Salisbury University (Maryland) and Eastern Illinois University he has sought to use his research to illuminate the epistemological and philosophical foundations of contemporary scientific controversies.